Bill Kelty believes employers have an absolute duty to provide workers with a safe, healthy workplace. He asked how any company can operate without giving occupational health and safety (OHS) its highest priority.
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Category: politics
The Rigged System Behind Workplace Injury and Illness
At the time of writing, it looks like the Democrats in the United States are smashing the Republicans and President Trump in the mid-term elections. One of the earliest winners was Democrat Jon Ossoff. His campaign strategy, focused on calling out presidential and political corruption, seems to have worked. This strategy of blunt honesty could be exported to Australia and applied in arguments about reducing work-related injuries and deaths.
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Safe Work Australia’s Big Bet on an Expanded OHS System
The release of Safe Work Australia’s Best Practice review left me wondering whether Australian work health and safety policy has reached regulatory overreach, or whether it is finally catching up with the realities of contemporary work.
Much of the discussion has focused on the report’s individual recommendations. What interests me more is an assumption that seems to underlie almost every recommendation: that occupational health and safety (OHS) should become the nation’s principal framework for preventing workplace harm in all its forms, not merely physical and psychological injury.
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Procurement as Safety Policy? The ACT’s Construction Culture Experiment
The culture standard for the construction industry has been discussed for several years. Trials have been conducted, and the results were positive, but the value of this standard has always depended on someone powerful implementing it in practice. Last year the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government embedded it into public-project procurement, arguing that government purchasing power can drive improvements in wellbeing, diversity and psychological safety across the construction sector.
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Safe Work Australia’s Review and the Predictable Politics of OHS Change
The “Best Practice Review of the Model Work Health and Safety Laws” report released by Safe Work Australia (SWA) is a lot to digest. Summaries and initial analyses are already appearing on some LinkedIn and law firm posts, but the report needs careful consideration. The recommendations seem sound, but such things almost always trigger a knee-jerk reaction from business groups, driven by ideological objections and concerns about increased business costs. I suspect we will see some of this objection in the media over the next few days.
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Rethinking Safety by Focusing on the Risks We Rarely See
Recent Nordic research has dropped a number that should unsettle Australia’s safety regulators: fatal workplace incidents make up only 1% of work‑related deaths. If similar proportions apply here, our entire inspection and prevention model is pointed at the wrong end of the problem.
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Christopher’s Death and the Questions That Still Demand Answers
Patrizia Cassaniti has produced a remarkable book about how her life changed due to the death of her 18-year-old son, Christopher, in a scaffold collapse in 2019. Her story comes from grief and anger, and the book is one of the few that made me cry.
Cassaniti’s story is compelling and heartbreaking, but its refusal to name those responsible for the scaffold collapse shapes the book’s impact and raises deeper questions about accountability in workplace deaths. The new first-person accounts in the last third of the book are enlightening and enraging.
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